But what about old printer and MFP drivers that actually need to interact with hardware for things like printing, scanning, sending/receiving faxes, supporting MFP buttons “scan to PC”, etc.? Even if it’s possible to run those things in containers, how they are going to get there if user double click on binary installer or i386 deb downloaded from vendor’s web-site?
As for Steam - keep in mind that games published there need to interact with 32 bit OpenGL implementation, which means not only providing 32-bit Mesa as container dependency (which is Ok) and keeping it updated in timely manner (because in Linux gaming availability of fresh Mesa version make a difference between working system and GPU hang) but also providing every version of 32 bit Nvidia driver that should match version of kernel driver to be operational.
Honestly, I’m all for dropping i386 repo, but solutions for keeping people’s hardware and software running have be tested in real world and be reliable. At this moment there is no solutions, but only blind assumption, that these solutions could be created (which could be possible, but it’s remain to be seen). Dropping i386 now is like putting the cart before the horse.